


Even If It Blinds Me, I Can't Stop Looking at the Sun

by ActuallyAndroid



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Obsession, One-Sided Attraction, Unrequited Love, hanahaki
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-04 13:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12771825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ActuallyAndroid/pseuds/ActuallyAndroid
Summary: A love borne out of jealousy will last no longer than it takes a French Marigold to bloom.





	Even If It Blinds Me, I Can't Stop Looking at the Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [krystallisert](https://archiveofourown.org/users/krystallisert/gifts).



It begins with a Marigold.

Far from bloom, the flower nestles into a tight, little bud at the centre of his palm - leaves peeling back at the tips to reveal flushed, yellow petals that crumple in on themselves like they’re ready to burst. It’s too young to be beautiful, but there’s something endearing about how small it feels against the palm of his hand, as though it’s curling away from the vastness of the outside by shyly twisting into itself.

Akira’s been working with flowers for a while now. He’s got a full-time job at a flower shop down in the bowels of Shibuya metro station, organising bouquets and sticking labels to the sides of flowerpots. He specifically remembers neatly lining one up onto a ceramic pot earlier in the day, straightening the edges, smoothing it down, and reading it over.

‘French marigolds flower in spring,’ it says, ‘although their blooms last until the first sign of frost.’

Funnily enough, it’s spring now. The last few days of March are still too acquainted with winter to temper the freezing chill in the air, so the breeze has a bite to it, nipping against his skin where it brushes past him. He shivers a little, pulling his blazer into himself to cover more of his chest, and lifts the flower from his palm into his other hand to bring it closer to his face.

It’s strange to see it so blatant in front of him. There’s been an uncharacteristic dismissiveness in the way he’s approached (avoided, rather) any thoughtful evaluation of his own feelings in terms of you, because admitting that he’s head over heels for someone that he shouldn’t even be heels over head for leaves a bad taste in his mouth that’s not just a result of the leaves inside of his throat.

Even beyond that, it’s a shock to be forcefully dragged out from a routine he’s barely resigned himself to. To everything he’s been sweeping under the carpet, under the flushed skin of his shy smiles when you send yours in his direction, under the burning blaze of envy when your hands intertwine (not with his own), under, under, _under_.

It’s flashing bright yellow like a warning colour. ‘You’re in danger,’ it says, and the comment kind of bounces off him. At least until the thrum of his heart comes back with a bang in his throat, and he wakes.

He knows what coughing up flowers means.

It’s a realisation almost too blunt and sudden for the haze he’s in right now, like the cowardly part of his subconscious is stealing his focus and hiding it somewhere he can’t hope to reach it. ‘I’ve been working with flowers all day,’ he thinks. ‘Maybe one fell in my mouth when I wasn’t looking.’ But the bitter taste of petal against the back of his throat is too real to be that carelessly hand-waved. This thing came from inside of him. He has to accept that.

Perhaps it’s been a long time coming. Akira doesn’t need a flower to recognise his own jealousy; he’s hardly unfamiliar to the unpleasant coil that comes with wanting something he knows will never belong to him. It’s just easier to ignore it when it’s not staring him in the face, neatly wrapped into a bud that bears a weight ill-suited to its demureness.

So he’s in love with someone that won’t love him back. As if he didn’t know that. But now what?

Well, for starters, hanahaki can be a fatal condition. He probably shouldn’t scoff at that. Many have died out of their decision not to remove the plants coiling in their lungs, hoping (against all odds) that their love be returned and the flowers wither. Akira fancies himself more intelligent than to die at the hands of something preventable, but he knows it’s not entirely about that, either. Even if the decision seems clear (make a stop at the nearest emergency clinic as fast as possible, organise an appointment, get the damn things out of his body), it leaves loose ends that cut it just short of being a satisfying conclusion.

Namely, there’s an incident starring a little girl in his class from years and years ago, unlucky enough to be afflicted with the disease at the tender age of seven and a half. The right choice becomes a little more complex when he remembers her sad face the day after surgery. (Well, not sad, not really. More despondent and empty.) But that’s not half the extent of how much the whole situation progresses into a train wreck. Akira watches the whole thing from the side lines, and it feels like a wallflower watching a car crash in slow motion.

Nothing really changes at first, because she still _likes_ her friends. She _likes_ the new cell phone she gets on her eighth birthday, and she _likes_ playing hopscotch out in the field when it’s sunny. But there’s something missing.

Talking with her classmates becomes less fun and more of a chore. Akira sees her fingers twining together like the flowers that she lost, and she begins having violent outbursts in class, which is very out-of-character considering her reputation as the demure girl. For the worst of it, she shouts and yells when the teacher puts on a film about two pre-teens holding hands and declaring their love; she tears up her exercise book, breaks her friend’s pencil, and stands on the classroom stuffed bear, tearing it from limb to limb, because no one believes her when she says she’s not going to be loved, because she can’t love anyone back. That’s what taking away the flowers does.

When her mother comes home to pick her up (early, as is becoming the norm) the poor woman looks completely at her wit’s end. It strikes Akira that even platonic love has been torn out of his classmate, which is why her mother doesn’t look surprised when her own child looks her in the eyes and tells her that she hates her. Because what’s a ‘ _like’_ to a disagreement? It’s easy to destroy a relationship that’s based entirely on how much one person finds the other congenial.

Akira shivers a little more into himself, looks around, and realises he’s been standing around in the middle of a busy road for long enough that people have begun staring. Throwing the flower away feels too fast (too decisive), so he curls his fist around it and stows it in the pocket of his blazer.

He needs to start moving, he thinks. He needs to _move on_.

Shit.

 

* * *

 

 

Akira doesn’t go the hospital that night.

He logs onto his computer as soon as he gets home, in such a hurry to assess the situation that he barely remembers to greet Sojiro, which is probably the reason he follows him upstairs after a few minutes and asks if everything’s alright.

“Why wouldn’t it be? Akira asks. He thinks he’ll tell him in due time, (not that he has a choice if he wants to live) but that doesn’t mean he’s ready quite yet. It’s not hard to imagine Sojiro won’t rest until the flowers are excised and out of his body, which is understandable, but giving up so quickly would make the whole thing feel kind of underwhelming.

“No reason,” Sojiro says, but Akira can still read concern in his eyes until he half-hardheartedly mentions dinner will be ready soon and takes his leave.

As soon as he's gone, Akira opens a few new tabs immediately. He spends the better half of thirty minutes reading articles on the internet, searching for a decently reliable source that’ll evaluate how he’s supposed to feel about being inflicted with the disease. He likes knowing the facts before making decisions, and right now he knows little to nothing about his predicament. Should he give up? Is he supposed to tell the person it concerns? Or should he ignore your messages and ghost you with the hopes it’ll pass eventually?

It’s a mess that he’s unconvinced he’ll be able to untangle, but a more comprehensive knowledge should, in the very least, help to make him feel a little more in control, which is one of the more pertinent factors in deciding whether he’s going to face this whole thing head-on or spend the next month and a half moping about.

A month and a half.

Admittedly, it’s not a brilliant deadline. Marigolds are at the top of the list for fast germination, which is bad news if he wants to survive this. Seven to eight weeks are all it takes for the flowers to bloom and rupture enough alveoli that his lungs fill with blood. It’s a scary thought, honestly, and he can’t help but feel concerned at its ambiguity.

 _Around_ a month and a half, he should say. There’s nothing stopping it from taking much less than that.

Eventually, Akira stumbles upon a website that lists a variety of hanahaki flowers in alphabetical order. The title's scientific terminology is encouraging; 'the associated dangers and types of hanahaki's unrequired romantic attraction depending on the symptomatic flower,' it reads, and the formatting seems formal enough that it feels less like a gossip piece and more like a credible study.

He supposes it makes sense that the conditions of the disease are different depending on the flower. Plants vary from one to the other after all, some grow slowly and are relatively harmless for months, while others are poisonous enough to kill as soon as they reach the throat. Winding roots make surgery less likely to be successful (read: non-lethal), although a flower that’s been roosting for long enough will be hard to remove regardless of its qualities.

The worst-case scenario appears to be a heliotrope: a pretty, purple flower that’s poisonous enough to kill, although inconspicuous enough with its poison that no symptoms appear until it’s too late. Even more dire than that, the flower’s behaviour in hanahaki has given it a terrifying etymology; it means ‘eternal love,’ which is a cute sentiment given as a gift, but a death sentence coughed up. It describes a love which is inescapable and obsessive, like the pull of a black hole long-past the point of no-return. Looking it up only confirms that it’s pretty synonymous with being fucked over, because there’s no chance the love with wither along with the flower. The only other plant with quite the same gravity is a hemlock, which isn’t so much a death sentence as a symptom of death itself. If the victim lasts long enough to cough one out, their body is already, at best, mere minutes from respiratory failure because of the poison. It comes about with a dishonest confession from the loved one, a false declaration that their feelings are returned and they love you back.

It strikes him as cruel.

One minute you’re happy, free of flowers and unrequited love and then you last a week a best before you collapse in a seizure, final thought an awful awareness that even those feelings were a result of misdirection.

Akira’s situation isn’t ideal. Marigolds grow quickly, meaning he’s going to have to think on his feet if he ever wants to come to a solution. But at least he’s smart enough to realise he hasn’t got the short end of the stick this time round.

It could be worse.

A lot worse.

Marigolds are common in hanahaki. Marigolds are predictable. Marigolds in a bouquet mean cruelty, and marigolds in a pair of lungs mean a love borne out of jealousy. He can win this; it’s not an inescapable love like it would be with heliotrope blooms, so if he avoids you for long enough, they should wither for good.

Easy.

But it's not, because it's then that his phone buzzes from his side, and he finds it extremely bad timing that that it’s a message from you.

‘Akira, will you be in Shibuya tomorrow? I'm going shopping after school,’ it reads.

Even without prodding, he knows the only reason you asked him is because your boyfriend is too busy working. He's the second choice here, he _knows_ that, but he still can't help the smile that pulls on his face, makes him feel giddy enough to push away everything else, all the danger and planning and this is how it always goes with you, because he can't think straight for long enough to weigh his options before he's texting back.

‘Course. See you at the school gates.’

To his credit, it takes him barely a moment to realise he's royally fucked up on the first step. For at least the next ten minutes, he writes and rewrites an excuse that explains why he's just realised that tomorrow isn't a good day, because ' ~~I have work at the flower shop,~~ ' ' ~~I've already made plans with someone else~~ ,' ' ~~Sojiro wants me to help out at Leblanc~~ ,' but he's cut short of hitting send (that's what he tells himself, anyway) when you reply. 

'Thanks. I can always count on you.'

The leap of his heart is both absolutely too intense and absolutely too pathetic.

Maybe at this point he should admit it to himself. He’s not ready to give up on you quite yet, and there’s no way in a million years that he’ll be able to leave you on read, let alone consecutively. You’re taken, in relationship that feels too stable and watertight to break off anytime soon, and he sincerely doubts you’re the kind of person that would be alright with double-timing.

But none of that will stop him, because if he's not going to run and hide and he's not going to die, there's only one option left.


End file.
